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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny